Wolfgang R. Hess studied biology at the University of Rostock and the Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany, where he obtained his doctorate in 1990 and the habilitation in 1999. After a post-doc at the CNRS institute in Roscoff, France, running a junior research group at the Humboldt-University Berlin and pursuing research projects as visiting scientist at the Friedrich-Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S., he became in 2003 funding director of the Ocean Genome Legacy Foundation, a spin-off from the biotech company New England Biolabs. In 2004 he became appointed as a Professor for Experimental Bioinformatics and in 2008 as a Full Professor for Genetics at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He has been a William Evans Guest Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand.